Studying social work, a profession, within an open and distant learning (ODL)
context facilitates equal opportunities as it gives more and previously deprived
students the opportunity to become social workers. The Department of Social
Work at the University of South Africa (Unisa) became aware of the need for
social work-specific student support, taking into account the difficulty of studying
a profession in an ODL context. A qualitative research study in 2010 explored the
specific support needs for social work students studying at Unisa. Rothman and
Thomas’s Intervention Design and Development (IDD) model (1994) was adapted
to develop an online self-coaching programme. The goals of this programme are
to enhance student success and throughput, to accelerate personal, academic and
professional development of students, and to empower students to take ownership
of their learning process. As such, the programme facilitates self-regulated learning.
The aim of this article is to indicate the support needs of social work students
studying in an ODL context and to introduce the reader to the online self-coaching
programme which was developed in response to these needs whilst highlighting its
benefits and challenges.

Higher education institutions are gradually adopting online teaching and learning. This research was explorative and descriptive in approach to explore students’ online interactivity with their peers and lecturers in a distance education context. Focus group interviews with 54 participants were conducted at six regional campuses of the University of South Africa. The sample consisted of second and third-year Health Services Management (HSM) students. Data was collected from June to September 2012. Giorgi’s phenomenological approach was used for data analysis. The findings revealed that students benefitted from online interactivity but encountered more challenges than benefits. Challenges were academic, institutional and administrative in origin. The article recommends a collaborative effort by the university management, information technology specialists, students, lecturers, and the public and private sectors to resolve these challenges. The university should further consider and formalise utilisation of other social media like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram besides the prescribed online interactive tools to promote online interaction and to facilitate teaching and learning.

Most of the available literature underscores general high student attrition in distance
education (DE), emphasising a lack of relational and academic support as being
largely to blame for these attrition rates. The literature on student support in DE
seems to indicate an institutional responsibility to curb attrition. In the realisation
that this assertion is an incomplete understanding of the factors that influence
attrition, the current study focused on describing the self-efficacy dispositions of
in-service teachers enrolled in a DE programme. The research was theoretically
underpinned by Bandura’s self-efficacy theory and applied a quantitative descriptive
approach. The study population comprised of 1800 DE students at Solusi University
in Zimbabwe. Stratified sampling was used to select 360 students as respondents.
Data were collected using Schwarzer and Jerusalem’s (1995) Generalised Self-
Efficacy questionnaire which employs a 10-item Likert scale. Data analysis was
based on exploratory factor analysis. The results indicate that to continue with their
DE studies, students require coping skills, proactivity, ingenuity, problem-solving
ability and tenacity as self-efficacy dispositions. In line with the study’s findings, it is
recommended that further research in student support could focus on the extent to
which identified self-efficacy dispositions predict success in both the continuous and
final assessment in DE.

Zimbabwe has managed to respond to the movement in support of UNESCO’S lifelong learning concept and strategy that seeks to widen and deepen access to higher education through distance education initiatives. Despite the significant increase in students enrolling in distance education institutions, the gold standard of excellence that is sought by many nations has gradually been compromised. There are symptoms of a downward trend in terms of quality in open distance learning institutions. The qualitative study analysed major factors affecting the provision of quality distance higher education with specific reference to the Zimbabwe Open University, the sole provider of university distance education in Zimbabwe. The study focused on three Zimbabwe Open University regional centres in Zimbabwe. The paper seeks to identify major factors contributing to the declining quality of distance education and discusses measures that distance education providers in Zimbabwe can undertake in order to promote excellence for effective learning in the 21st century. The study established that several factors are affecting the quality of distance education in Zimbabwe. The lack of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) facilities at regional and district centres was a major hindrance to effective teaching and learning.

The commercialization of higher education compels higher education institutions to look at alternative and inclusive ways to accommodate the ever-growing diverse student population. One of the methods is the change to online teaching for distance education students. However, to successfully teach and study online, specific skills and competencies are required from both lecturers and students. The study reported on (phase 1 of a three-year project) in this article, sought to assess faculty members’ levels of digital fluency at a major open distance education and learning (ODL) institution. A quantitative, non-experimental descriptive, cross-sectional survey was conducted. The results indicate that faculty members are willing to use new teaching technology, but perceive their own skills to be inadequate. The result of this study might influence tuition policy and address continuous development strategies in the ODL institution.

This article explores the experiences of students who participated in a distance service-learning programme. The students from Lesotho, Kenya, Malawi and Zimbabwe had completed a service-learning project in their communities. Using telephone interviews, this study attempted to ascertain the benefits and challenges of doing service-learning via distance learning, and in addition to establish whether the experience had been meaningful to the students from an Afrocentric perspective. Interviews of 11 students revealed that the challenges they had experienced were those commonly experienced by African students enrolled in distance learning. Service-learning added challenges in terms of additional costs, and the difficulties of establishing relationships of trust in communities. The students also reported having a sense of responsibility and empathy towards others which made their service-learning endeavours meaningful to them. Issues of social justice and learning from the communities in which they were placed did not feature in the interviews. This highlights the importance of foregrounding these matters in the materials developed for these courses.

Despite the integration of technology in higher education, there is currently a paucity of research in the field of social entrepreneurship education in South Africa regarding the use of asynchronous communication supported by teaching resources in cultivating critical learning capacities through autonomous learning. Informed by the community of inquiry framework of Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2007), this study examined the cognitive, social and teaching presences among pre-service educators in online group blogs in relation to the film Who cares? which was used as a primary teaching resource in a social entrepreneurship module. In this study, the participants’ posts and comments were collected, coded and analysed using ATLAS.ti. The results revealed that, after viewing the film, the participating pre-service educators established high cognitive, social and teaching presences, respectively. The results of the study further illustrated that online group blogs in combination with film could provide pedagogical spaces for students to establish a community of inquiry in which pre-service educators’ critical learning capacities were enhanced through autonomous learning.

This paper flows from a pre-conference workshop developed and facilitated by the author for the National Association of Distance Education and Open Learning in South Africa (Nadeosa) conference 2017. The paper and workshop explore the nature of programmes generally and the particular challenges of designing programmes for open, distance and e-learning (ODeL), in particular drawing upon the author’s work for Saide, the University of Pretoria and a DEd study in progress exploring the mainstreaming of Open Educational Resources in curriculum practices. Approaching the issue from a non-determinist, interpretivist and transactional perspective, and drawing upon a number of metatheoretical perspectives, but most strongly hermeneutics and systems theory, it is argued that while there is no one right way to develop a programme for an ODeL context, there are a number of questions and perspectives that are likely to provide useful lenses. This argument favours curriculum as an evolving and consultative process rather than a discrete and technical event.